Dec 22 – O Rex Gentium

The Baltimore Catechism asks the question, “Why did God make you?” and the answer, while straightforward, is also profound: He made us to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this life, and to be happy with Him forever in the next. He is our beginning and our end – we were literally made for Him, and our greatest happiness will be found in loving Him. Of course, He cannot force us to love Him; in fact He gave us a free will so that it is entirely our choice. But then He chose to come to us as an Infant, because it is easy to love infants. May He grant us the grace this Christmas to lay down our hearts and our very lives in adoration before our Newborn King, who holds out a hand to each of us, inviting us to allow Him to satisfy the desires of our hearts.

Read it all.

O King of all the nations, the only joy of every human heart; O Keystone of the mighty arch of man, come and save the creature you fashioned from the dust.

And finally, taking his cue from his voyage to the Czech Republic, a country where the majority is agnostic or atheist, Joseph Ratzinger launched a new evangelization aimed precisely at those who are far from God. As in the ancient temple of Jerusalem, the pope proposed that the Church open for them “a sort of court of the gentiles,” where the search and the thirst for him can be kept alive.